Abstract:
The study investigated demographic variables as predictors of social media utilization for information service delivery by librarians in Federal University libraries in South-South, Nigeria. The study adopted the correlation research design. Eight (8) research questions and six (6) hypotheses guided the study. The population of the study comprised 174 professional librarians in the six Federal universities spread across the six states of South-South, Nigeria. The entire 174 professional librarians were used for the study through total enumeration technique because the entire population size was manageable. The instrument used for data collection was a researcher developed questionnaire titled “Social Media Utilization for Information Service Delivery Questionnaire - SMUISDQ”. The questionnaire was face validated by two experts in the Department of Library and Information Science, and one specialist in Measurement and Evaluation from the Faculty of Education, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. The overall reliability of the instrument yielded 0.92 with the use of Cronbach Alpha Coefficient. Linear Regression was used to answer the research questions while the six null hypotheses were tested with the use of ANOVA at 0.05 level of significance. The major findings of the study were that the librarians’ age, and the physical location of librarians significantly predicted their use of social media, while gender, education, experience and income did not significantly predict social media utilization. The implication of the findings is that, only age and physical location of librarians are significant demographic variables that determine the use of social media by librarians. Based on the findings, it was recommended as follows:that library managers should focus on employing young librarians with knowledge of ICTs, that library administrators should plan specialized programmes on the use of social media for the older librarians; that the library administrators should assign more social media related tasks to the younger librarians; that library administrators should intensify efforts to provide the required infrastructure for accessing the internet especially for University libraries in rural communities, that library administrators should assign social media related tasks to professional librarians, irrespective of their gender since gender does not significantly predict social media use by librarians; and that the library administrators should be encouraged to employ librarians with the required professional qualifications.
